Unofficial news and tips about Google

January 25, 2008

Google Reader Shows the Published Date

Besides a new favicon and a confirmation dialog displayed when you mark all the posts as read, Google Reader now shows the published date of a post in a tooltip. Next to the snippet, Google Reader displays the date when the post was indexed by Google, not the date when it was published. Sometimes the difference between these two dates can be a single minute, but it could also be much bigger.

Google Reader also added some new keyboard shortcuts: a to add subscriptions, g+d to open the feed directory, e to email the current item. You can see the list of keyboard shortcuts by typing ? in Google Reader.

31 comments:

Reader also started to respond to every click of the "Mark all as read" button with a pop-up that asked "Are you sure you want to mark all as read?" Very irritating! Yet as soon as I joined a number of people in complaining about it on the Reader Google Groups site, it went away. Did they change their mind? Is it intermittent? Will it return to annoy again? Or was it all a horrible nightmare?

"This dialog box doesn't show up every time, but only if you're marking50 or more posts as read. We chose this as a balance between helpingpeople avoid accidentally losing large amounts of unread items, whilenot being so intrusive as to interrupt people on every single mark-all-as-read action. Thanks for your feedback on it, though. We appreciatehearing what folks think about features and changes so we can keepiterating and improving.

I mentioned this in the first of line. The confirmation dialog didn't disappear, it's displayed only if the number of items is bigger than a certain value (I suspect the value is 100, but I could be wrong).

Thanks for clarifying this, but Google Reader should learn something from Gmail's unintrusive UI that shows an option to "undo" almost every important action. Instead of asking you if you want to mark all the posts as read, Google Reader should display this message:

It should be something on the lines of:--Published: 4 hours agoReceived: within 50 minutes--or--Published: Yesterday, 16:00Received: within 2 hours--It's pretty useless to show "Jan 25, 2008" twice, and the year should only appear if its not this current year.

In the Reader Help Center, the "Are there any keyboard shortcuts?" question http://www.google.com/support/reader/bin/answer.py?answer=69973 has a chart of GReader keyboard shortcuts.This chart has not been updated with the new shortcuts.The chart ought to be offered as a separate printable page, also.

I love how GReader is getting more and more user-friendly. My current thing I want most is the settings option to open any item in a BACKGROUND tab. This would be a timesaver. It's a feature that has been widely requested.

It's great that they've added a new "e" shortcut to email, but it's annoying that I still have to revert back to the mouse to actually hit the "send" button. I wish they would a a shortcut to send the emailed post as well.

I noticed that when you get a list of keyboard shortcuts (by typing "?"), you can open it in a new page and print it. This page has been updated, unlike the Help question which I mentioned 4 comments back.

Another "fine-tuning" timesaving option that I'd enjoy would be a setting option to return to "All Items" after you "Mark all as read" in any folder or subscription.

A lot of these tweak requests are minor in the big scheme of things, but more choice is always better, and over time these little savings in keystrokes add up to the difference between trudging through an app and flying with it, if you know what I mean.

I've made a better GReader keyboard shortcut. My goal is to just use keys to navigate smoothly through my hundred+ blog posts a day. You can download it and print it out. Explained here: http://a-place-for-my-thoughts.blogspot.com/2008/01/google-reader-keyboard-shortcuts-better.html Direct link: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dgbj7v5z_4pw7t32gx

Can someone help me with Google Reader?I only discovered it today, so i don't know much about it.

My questions are:Does it always take 15-30 minutes after the article has been published on its original website (eg BBC) for it to appear on google reader? And if so, does that time vary for different subscriptions?